Don’t feed the ducks! Welcome to Dawlish, Britain’s bossiest town

Dawlish is a person? No, it’s a seaside town in Devon, home to some 11,000 people.

Dawlish is smallish. Also very pretty, known for its sandy beachfront and lovely black swans.

And it’s bossy, you say. Yes, Dawlish is Britain’s bossiest town.

Interesting. How do you go about measuring that sort of thing? You don’t really; you just write the headline after someone complains on TripAdvisor.

Complains about what, exactly? The oppressive abundance of signage in and around the town. A visitor using the name SW wrote: “Absolutely everywhere I looked there was a sign telling me to comply in one way or another. There are literally dozens and dozens of them.”

What do they say? “Please keep dogs on leads”, “Please do not feed the gulls”, “No cycling”, “No boat launching”, “Please do not chase the birds” and “Welcome to Dawlish”.

That last one’s not so bad. It’s the proliferation of unnecessary and often contradictory signage that SW was most narked about, insisting it created a “big brother” atmosphere and spoiled the views.

Who is responsible for all this passive-aggressive messaging? SW assumes it is “the ruling local councillors whom I imagine to be hen-pecked do-gooders of independent means with zero understanding of human behaviour or even basic visual perspective”.

If I were the mayor of Dawlish, I wouldn’t take that lying down. He hasn’t. “I agree with the comments that we have too many negative signs in Dawlish,” says Mayor Martin Wrigley

What’s he planning to do? “We will be looking at both reducing the number and writing them in positive terms,” he says. “For example, encouraging visitors to use the duck food that we supply outside our waterfowl enclosure rather than saying don’t feed bread to the birds.”

Great. Everybody is in complete agreement. Not quite everybody. Vanessa Riley from Dawlish chamber of trade thinks the signs are necessary to protect birds and other wildlife. “People that have not seen the signs have let dogs off,” she says.